Creating a Kitchen

I'm a complete victim of lifestyle/decorating magazines -- This Old House, Handyman, Old House Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Country Living -- I've always loved reading magazines about fixing up old homes or getting all crafty during certain holidays, so when we knew we were going to buy a 220 year old house I began to study these magazines like scripture, memorizing styles that I liked, studying color schemes, wedging sticky notes onto pages that had something on them I'd like to replicate, and otherwise fantasizing about my dream home. And just as often, reading about how to modernize something quirky that goes with an old house, like floors that aren't level, having one electrical outlet per room, or figuring out how to eliminate mystery drafts.

Because it doesn't quite look like Martha Stewart's Maine estate "Skylands" (yes, I know the names Martha has for her homes) our new house fell a bit short of "dream" status. In all honesty though, it's pretty close, or as close as I want to get without the the benefit of a full-time housekeeper and groundskeeper. AND! the property came with an unusual bonus... a naked kitchen.

We all know that the kitchen is a key selling point for any home so we surmised that Naked Kitchen (see right) was probably one of the main reasons why the house had been on the market for so long. Naked Kitchen was basically one large, long room. No counters or cabinets at all. All this room had to offer was a standalone refrigerator, a lonely gas range, and a spindly looking old-fashioned porcelin sink with it's belly and pipes shamefully exposed. When we first went through the house I desperately wanted to grab a curtain and cover it's scrawny 2X4 legs and provide it with some dignity. While the cranberry-painted trim had a period look the walls were sponge-painted a yellow gold. Very, very wrong.

But my husband and I are optimists. We tend to see all the possibilities in something rather than all the problems so for us Naked Kitchen was a selling point. We could make our dream kitchen because all we had right now was a big blank slate! There was just one problem: budget.

The house was a short sell and we were shopping on a short-sell budget. For the past two years we had been renting a small cottage on a lake in central New Hampshire, a cottage that got much smaller when my older stepson dropped out of college and moved back in with us. With a certain budget in mind my husband and I started househunting, one of those couples in a position to take advantage of the disaster zone that the housing market had become in recent years. We had been casually looking around for 12 or so months and even considered an old farmhouse that had not yet been outfitted with indoor plumbing or heat. Yes boys and girls, believe it or not there are still some folks who live on the farm like it's 1910.

Anyway, we fell in love with this house almost immediately. We lumbered through the tedious process of purchasing a short sell property and when we finally signed the papers Naked Kitchen became our challenge. The mission: Create a kitchen we could love on a shoestring budget.